Dying for Truth

I’m sorry I haven’t written anything since I got out of the hospital – I’ve been too busy doing everything I wanted to do in Mexico. I went scuba diving, jetskiing, wrote an article about getting sick on a vacation, went up to a small town in the mountains, tried some awesome seafood.

So I’ve been enjoying myself. Finally! But I haven’t totally forgotten journalism or the sad reality here in Mexico.

Yesterday a female crime reporter and columnist Yolanda Ordaz de la Cruz was found murdered in the city of Veracruz. Headcount for murdered journalists since 2000 has risen to 77; 23 have gone missing since 2003.

“Ordaz was one of those journalists who were exposed to danger because of their reporting speciality. At the same time, a link to organized crime obviously cannot be excluded in a state where three feared gangs, the Zetas, the Gulf Cartel and Michoacán’s La Familia, operate. And it is hard not to link Ordaz’s murder with that of her colleague, López, whose columns may have upset certain officials,” says Reporters without Borders.

Ordaz is the seventh murdered journalist in Mexico this year. In June her colleague Noel Lopez Olguin was found dead after been missing for three months.

I find myself speechless. I have the utmost respect for these brave journalists, who risked their lives for the truth. No one should ever have to die because of truth. The truth is our right, the right of the people. Journalists in Europe working in safe offices with safe subjects and have no idea what the reality can be. But don’t get me wrong: all journalists should be able to work in a safe office, write about the truth and at the end of the day, go home to their families with no fear of being threatened, kidnapped or killed. Or even worse; fear that something would happen to their loved ones.

It’s so easy to forget what happens to hundreds of journalists every year when you don’t have to face it every day. And who am I to say, anyway? I’m in Mexico, yes, but I have nothing in common with these brave reporters: except maybe passion for journalism and thirst for truth. But I can’t count myself as one of them: I wouldn’t dare to put myself in their league.

Reporters without Borders is working hard to protect journalists, trying to establish different programs and raise awareness. But is it helping? Can we see a future where every single journalist can work without fear?

I do not think so. And I find it absolutely remarkable that despite the fact they might be tortured or killed, many journalists keep going. They are not stopping. They have a higher calling.

I do not want to die because of my job, but I do envy these journalists: they have a deep passion that I want to share with them. Hopefully one day we can all share it – and be safe.

"Journalism can never be silent: that is its greatest virtue and its greatest fault. I must speak, and speak immediately, while the echoes of wonder, the claims of triumph and the signs of horror are still in the air."

-Henry Anatole Grunwald